The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - ColdFusion: Co-existing with IIS? (is it ISAPI?)

ColdFusion: Co-existing with IIS? (is it ISAPI?)

I have ASP experience but basically no ColdFusion experience. In the near future, we may need to host some ColdFusion stuff on our webserver, which is already running a bunch of ASP stuff.

I know that older versions of ColdFusion were implemented as ISAPI layers, so it could co-exist with IIS on port 80 and actually be called from within IIS... IIS would call either ASP.dll or ColdFusion's DLLs to process the page, based on the page's file extension.

Is this still the case with the current version of ColdFusion? It seems like ColdFusion is its own server now or something, it seems to want to listen on port 8500 by default or something. I don't want to use ports other than 80 for firewall reasons; thus my question... trying to figure out if we'll need a separate box and/or IP address for the CF server, or what....

John Rose
Friday, January 2, 2004

CF and ASP can coexist on the same IIS server, no problem. It installs an ISAPI layer, and renders it based on file extension.

CF includes it's own standalone HTTP server for development only (by default it listens on some high port in the 8000's). You don't want to try deploying a production site with the stand-alone CF web server.

During the CF install process, it will ask you if you want it to be stand-alone, or part of an IIS install. Choose IIS.

Myron A. Semack
Friday, January 2, 2004

Thanks very much! That's exactly what I needed to know. Much appreciated.

John Rose
Friday, January 2, 2004

I may be wrong, but from what I understand, you need to purchase ColdFUsion MX Enterprise to get the stand alone web server, I think the regular edition needs a j2EE application server to work.

vince
Saturday, January 3, 2004

Not quite. The "Professional" edition runs stand-alone. It has a version of Jrun built-in. However, you can't use it to run other J2EE apps.

Also, you can't run the Professional edition as a j2EE only app.

The Enterprise edition also has some things like clustering, and an improves search engine.

Myron A. Semack
Sunday, January 4, 2004